Steven Gore - Absolute Risk

Casher took in a breath, then stretched his neck and adjusted his tie.

“We’re…uh…sharing information with the PLA.”

Wallace fixed his own expression in place. He knew that Casher expected him to redden and pound the desk, furious at the thought of making an alliance with the second most powerful army in the world that was also the force behind the economic machine aimed at crushing the West.

Instead, Wallace asked, “Is it a two-way street?”

Casher nodded.

“And what have we gotten for what we’ve given them? “

Wallace watched Casher lean forward, not quite like a dam breaking, but close.

“Most of our attention is focused on Chengdu because that’s where the rebellion began-“

“Because of all of the deaths in the earthquake.”

Casher nodded. “The surrounding provinces are watching the rebels there. A leader has emerged, a quiet guy, but charismatic. Over the last few days he’s stopped the killing and burning and organized the mob into a militia of sorts. He’s even set up people’s courts and detention centers for corrupt officials.”

Wallace’s face betrayed him with a smirk. “Some kind of a Sichuan-flavored George Washington?”

“Not as different as you might think. And that’s why the PLA takes him seriously.”

Wallace felt the pressure of Casher’s stare.

“You ever put your life on the line for something?” Casher asked. “Knowing that you were going to lose it?”

They both knew the answer. Wallace’s two tours in Vietnam were spent working in the embassy. Never once in his life had Wallace doubted but that he’d die in his sleep when old age had depleted his body. Even the occasional death threats he’d received from fringe lunatics hadn’t driven him toward thoughts of mortality and the shuddering terror of a violent death.

“Old Cat is a dead man and he knows it,” Casher said. “He’s shouldering the guilt for the lynchings and the bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head-executions even though it was just mob violence and he didn’t order any of it.”

“You sound like you have a lot of respect for the guy.”

Casher sighed. “I wish he was on our side. I’d trade for him in a heartbeat. I’d trade away all of our wannabe Pinochets and Afghan tribal leaders and Mubaraks and the whole lot of Saudi princes for just one like-“

Wallace raised his hand. “This isn’t the time or place to get into those issues. The question on the table is what we can learn from him.”

Wallace watched Casher flush, and he knew he was wrong. He grasped that now was exactly the time and place, and that the failure to address those kinds of issues at the right time and in the right place had led to one U.S. foreign policy disaster after another, from Vietnam to Iraq.

“Let me rephrase that,” Wallace said. “Let’s start with what’s going on now, then you can have as much time as you need to tell me what you think all of this means.”

Wallace picked up his telephone from its cradle and punched in the intercom numbers for his secretary. He waited for her to answer, then said, “Cancel all of my appointments for the rest of the day…all of them.”

He hung up and looked at Casher and nodded.

“The PLA has made sure that there is uninterrupted cell service in the areas in which Old Cat operates,” Casher said. “His people have taken over the government complex in central Chengdu and they’re operating a court at the Meinhard plant in the special economic zone.”

“Does he realize that he’s being intercepted? “

Casher shook his head. “I don’t think so. He’s a farmer. He’d probably never even touched a mobile phone until a few days ago. But he’s using one now and the people around him are using them, too. And one of those is an anthropologist from Berkeley, Faith Gage.”

Wallace did a little head shake. “You mean an American has joined the revolution. Or worse, is leading it?”

“Not quite. She’s there with her students doing research. Her husband is Graham Gage, the private investigator.”

“From San Francisco. I know who he is. Spectrum hired him years ago when a triad tried to extort our people in Taipei. He made the gangsters go away, but I never found out how.”

“His wife has been feeding information about payoffs-names, dates, and bank account numbers-to the staff in his office. And then they’re using it to do a huge amount of data mining to put it all together in what will in the end probably look like a mass criminal indictment.”

Wallace cocked his head as he looked over at Casher. “Are we allowed to intercept domestic Internet traffic without a warrant? “

“We’re not doing it. The PLA is and then they’re passing the information on to us.”

Wallace bit his lower lip for a moment, and then said, “I don’t know much about criminal law, but that sounds like illegally obtained evidence.”

“It’s only evidence if we use it to prosecute people, which is not our intention. But Old Cat is. They’re debriefing officials and company owners and executives and then trying to verify what the crooks say before they act on it.”

“You mean line people up against the wall.”

Casher nodded. “Probably.”

Wallace thought back to the exasperated expression on his chief of staff’s face as he explained to Wallace the facts of Chinese corruption and the hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes that RAID had paid over the years, and by implication what Spectrum and other U.S. companies had paid.

“How bad will it be for us if this information gets out?” Wallace asked.

“Devastating. We’d be forced to indict the elite of our corporate leadership or lose whatever moral authority we have left in the world.”

The words hung in the silence that followed, sharing space with the implication that disclosure was unavoidable.

“Is Graham Gage connected to what his wife is doing?” Wallace asked.

“Indirectly. He’s only done two things: He set up the connection between her and his staff to do the research, and he sent in a human trafficker to smuggle out a couple of people in exchange for their cooperation with the rebels.”

“A human trafficker? He’s made a career of fighting those gangsters.”

“He does what he needs to do.” Casher said the words in a tone that implied what they both knew to be true: that Casher had done the same and would do it again.

“His only motive is to save lives. He’s doing his part long distance, from Marseilles, where he’s working on something else-or at least we think it’s something else. But we’re not sure since most of the calls he’s made to his office have been encrypted and the only nonencrypted call was too vague for us to draw any conclusions from.”

Wallace paused, realizing that things were moving too fast and as part of a game that seemed to be without rules. He knew that he needed to slow down. He took a step back.

“Will the PLA really let these people get away? They must know it’s going to happen.”

“We assume they do, but we don’t know whether they’ll allow it. If they charge into the Meinhard facility within the next twenty-four hours and execute everyone, then we’ll have our answer.”

“And what do we want them to do? “

Casher pointed over his shoulder toward the door. “That’s up to the man in the Oval Office, not me.”

Batkoun Benaroun filled two shot glasses with bourbon. They were sitting in the back room of a North African bar owned by a childhood friend of Benaroun’s fifteen minutes after they’d broken free from the Mercedes. It was a space of chipped paint and ground-in dirt, of a floor that was swept, but seldom washed, and of hand-smudged entrance and exit doors with deadbolts, but no doorknobs.